We live in a world where almost every piece of software is sold back to us as a subscription. Tools that wrap open-source libraries in slick dashboards suddenly cost $599/month.

For startups or indie developers, that kind of pricing doesn’t just sting — it can be the difference between shipping and stalling.

So I ran an experiment: could I build a collaborative coding interview tool, the kind that companies usually pay top dollar for, in a single afternoon, on a budget of exactly $0?

👉 Spoiler: yes. I built it on Vercel, with Claude Code as my copilot, and open-sourced it for anyone to use.

🚀 Try CollabCode Here

Why Vercel Was the Perfect Playground

If you’ve ever deployed on traditional cloud providers, you know the drill:

• Spinning up servers

• Configuring networking and SSL

• Wrestling with YAML files at 2 a.m.

Vercel removes all of that friction. It turns deployment into something closer to publishing a blog post. You connect your repo, push to main, and within seconds your app is live on a production URL with global CDN, HTTPS, and serverless functions already wired up.

For CollabCode, this was a blessing. I wasn’t spending mental energy on infrastructure; I was spending it on features.

Claude Code: My Weekend Pair Programmer

Without Claude Code, this project might still be sitting in my “someday” folder.

Instead of staring at documentation for hours, I used Claude like a senior engineer I could ping every 30 seconds:

• “Why is Firepad duplicating events?”

• “How do I generate short session codes instead of UUIDs?”

• “Can you write me a snippet for switching syntax highlighting across 16 languages?”

Claude didn’t just spit out answers — it explained trade-offs, suggested better patterns, and helped debug recursive bugs that had my editor looping text into infinity.

What used to take days of trial-and-error was compressed into hours.

✨ What CollabCode Can Do

Here’s a quick snapshot of the features:

📂 View GitHub Repo

Feature Grid

The Recursion Nightmare

Not everything worked perfectly. At one point, every keystroke started multiplying endlessly, freezing both my screen and my friend’s.

The culprit? I was re-initializing Firepad on every event.

The fix? One boolean flag:

let initialized = false;
if (initialized) return;
initialized = true;

That single line saved the project — and my laptop.

Real-World Results

Here’s what happened in the first month:

📊 Stat Box

• 📝 Interviews run: 67

• 💥 Crashes: 2 (both fixed quickly)

• 💸 Firebase bill: $0

• 💵 Money saved: ~$600

Lessons Learned

1. Vercel is the great equalizer. Deployment becomes a non-problem.

2. Claude accelerates learning. Debugging becomes conversation.

3. Most SaaS tools are markup, not innovation. They package free tech into subscriptions.

4. Open source is leverage. Sharing unlocks collective savings and collaboration.

The Bigger Picture

CollabCode isn’t perfect. It may crash. It may look simple. But it works.

And it proves a point: you don’t need six-figure budgets or enterprise SaaS subscriptions to build something practical.

Final Thought

The best code isn’t the cleanest or the most optimized — it’s the code that exists and solves a real problem.

CollabCode did that for me. Maybe it will for you too.

And if not? At least it didn’t cost $599.

⭐ Try CollabCode Free
📂 View the GitHub Repo